On 3 January 2026, Donald Trump announced on social media that the US had invaded Venezuela and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, without even seeking congressional approval and against international law. 

Last month, implementing an oil blockade of Venezuela, Trump demanded in a typically unhinged social media post that Venezuela "return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us."

The White House has announced the US intends to retain control of all sales of future oil production. Vice president JD Vance said, "We control the energy resources, and we tell the regime you’re allowed to sell the oil so long as you serve America’s national interest, you’re not allowed to sell it if you can’t serve America’s national interest."

Trump is also talking about more illegal military operations, threatening Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and Greenland, and has announced the total withdrawal of the US from the UN climate process, along with 65 other international and UN bodies.

Delivering for his backers

Less than two years previously, in a meeting with oil industry executives, Trump had demanded they raise $1bn for his White House re-election campaign and promised in return that if he was re-elected he would remove all climate regulations and environmental restrictions on pollution to boost their profits. The oil industry in turn wrote out executive orders ready for Trump to sign when he regained power.

Venezuela's massive oil reserves

Venezuela is sitting on oil reserves of over 300 billion barrels - more than any other country in the world, even Saudi Arabia, and three times as much as US reserves. Unlike Saudi Arabia or the US, however, this oil is mostly ultra-heavy crude oil, comparable only to Canada's tar sands. Because it is literally like tar, it needs to be melted with steam to be extracted and then diluted with lighter oil so it can be exported.

Despite these massive oil reserves, Venezuela's production levels have been relatively low in recent years. For two decades, from 1995 to 2015, Venezuela was producing around 3 million barrels a day, but this has dropped to less than one million, with the combined impact of US sanctions, mismanagement and a lack of investment in infrastructure maintenance. By comparison, under Obama, Trump and Biden, US oil production soared from around 7 million barrels to around 20 million barrels a day. (See this post and comments beneath).

In 2007, President Hugo Chávez implemented a policy that the national oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PdVSA) should control a majority share in all operations in the country. Chevron renegotiated and stayed. ConocoPhillips and Exxon left and sought compensation for their expropriated assets through a World Bank arbitration panel that awarded them billions (not all paid). Between the cost of restoring infrastructure, oil companies funnelling profits out of the country and Venezuela's onerous debt burden, it is unlikely the people of Venezuela would see any of the proceeds from increasing oil production for the foreseeable future. 

The global insurance industry is a massive paradox. On the one hand, they are bearing some of the massive financial costs of climate breakdown, and have raised the alarm about increased disasters making some areas 'uninsurable'.

The hot temperatures on May 1st across most of England and Wales were at least three times as likely due to climate change - and you can see that on the map below from Climate Central's Climate Shift Index.

This useful tool is not a straight temperature map - it shows how statistically unlikely temperatures would be if we hadn't heated up our atmosphere, land and oceans with fossil fuels.

You can see that there are extremely abnomally high temperatures in the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan and western India, South East Asia, much of sub-Saharan Africa, and Brazil. 

And then you might wonder, "Why haven't I seen anything about these heatwaves on the news?" The truth is that record-breaking temperatures elsewhere in the world rarely get a mention in UK media, unless they are in southern Europe where many of us take holidays.

These records are broken so frequently that, in a way, abnormal heat has become the 'new normal'. However, this phrase is misleading if it is taken to imply that things will stay the same - unless we stop burning fossil fuels, the weather will continue becoming more extreme.